For much of the cold war, academics and journalists interested
in examining cold war intelligence had limited documentary
resources with which to work. As files from both sides of the Iron
Curtain have become increasingly available, it has become possible
to shed new light on cold war intelligence operations. Paul
Maddrell has done just that in his account of Western (specifically
British, U.S., and West German) intelligence activities in Germany
from the end of World War II to the building of the Berlin Wall.
Bracketed between his introduction and conclusion are ten chapters
which, inter alia, focus on the extraction of intelligence from
refugees and defectors, returning prisoners of war, spies recruited
by a variety of means, intercepted letters and monitored
telecommunications, the British military liaison mission to East
Germany (Brixmis), and covertly installed sensor systems.

What Spying on Science makes very evident is that
Western intelligence aggressively employed every conceivable
technique and strategy to gather intelligence on Soviet technology,
particularly military technology. Thus, intelligence organizations
assiduously targeted individuals for defection, they were sure to
mine those crossing over to the West for whatever intelligence they
could provide and whatever leads they would give to potential
recruits for espionage, and they recruited those willing to spy in
exchange for money or a future in the West. Among the espionage
coups was America's recruiting of a dentist who treated members of
the SED Central Committee and who fitted a camera into a dental
tool. Meanwhile, U.S. or British agents attached Geiger counters to
railway lines running to the Soviet Union so that the radioactivity
of material being transported could be measured. The result was
intelligence on topics ranging from Soviet atomic capabilities and
facilities to electronics.

Beyond his portrayal of the Western intelligence effort,Maddrell
makes two additional points. He describes how the effort to induce
defection was not simply a means of obtaining intelligence, but
also an act of economic warfare—as it was expected that successful
defections would undermine East Germany's industrial capability,
causing further problems for the regime. In addition, he makes a
credible case that the collection effort within Germany represented
a significant intelligence breakthrough in the years before the U-2
and satellites—even though it was a limited breakthrough and the
value of the intelligence gathered, particularly from refugees,
defectors, and returned prisoners of war, would have become
outdated with the passage of time.

To produce his incredibly detailed account, Maddrell relies on
two sets of primary source materials—the British National Archives
and the files of the East German Ministry for State Security (MfS).
A significant number of the book's one-thousand-plus footnotes
refer to documents from those groups of records. Maddrell has also
mined secondary sources in English and German. What is largely
missing are primary sources from the United States. Discussions of
American (and West German) intelligence operations, when derived
from primary sources, come almost exclusively from British or MfS
files.

There are two other limitations to Maddrell's book. It would
have benefited from an early overview of the organizations in
Washington and London, as well as in the field, that gathered and
analyzed the intelligence collected across Germany—which ranged
from the well-known (the CIA and British Secret Intelligence
Service) to the obscure (the West German Main Office for
Questioning). In addition, while Maddrell's final chapter concerns
the use of the intelligence gathered, the focus here is largely on
how that intelligence spurred further collection
efforts—particularly the targeting of the U-2 spy plane and the
earliest reconnaissance satellites. While it would be expecting too
much for any author to be able to specify precisely how the
intelligence gathered influenced U.S. and British assessments of
Soviet capabilities, it would have been useful and interesting to
try to compare how assessments changed, in terms of details and
conclusions, in response to the data being gathered in Germany.

But the bottom line is that Maddrell's book is an example of
what can be accomplished by a dedicated author and is a significant
contribution to the history of cold war intelligence.

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